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A procedure for constructing social network using Web search engines: the case for Japanese automotive industry

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Abstract

Recently, search engines have enabled us to access immense quantities of useful information in an instant. In this paper, we propose a procedure for analyzing the social relationship and structure using Web search engines, which includes novel ways to create a search query and to use the number of hits. This allows us to construct various networks that reflect directed and undirected relationships among actors under arbitrary contexts. As a case study for evaluations of the proposed procedure, we focus on 50 companies belonging to the automotive industry in Japan. We constructed several directed and undirected networks under different temporal and geographical contexts. It is shown that we can acquire a general understanding of the industrial community through the analyses of these created networks and their centrality measures.

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Notes

  1. Cytoscape: http://www.cytoscape.org/.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank Dr. Jin Akaishi for technical advices for Web searches using the Google search engine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan

    Yuichi Kubota, Reiji Suzuki & Takaya Arita

Authors
  1. Yuichi Kubota
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  2. Reiji Suzuki
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  3. Takaya Arita
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yuichi Kubota.

Additional information

This work was presented in part at the 18th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Daejeon, Korea, January 30–February 1, 2013.

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Kubota, Y., Suzuki, R. & Arita, T. A procedure for constructing social network using Web search engines: the case for Japanese automotive industry. Artif Life Robotics 19, 103–108 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-013-0138-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-013-0138-5

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